Author Archives: MJC

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). http://photogrammar.yale.edu

The following nine PDFs are linked from Bibliothèque Kandinsky which published them online on an unknown date. Follow this link to explore the respective entries on its website. This is an important milestone in the digitalization of essential but hard-to-get art publications for the public use and we would like to express our gratitude and appreciation. <3 ! The whole set of these high-quality digital facsimiles is about 1 GB large, if anyone feels like starting a torrent to relieve bandwidth of the library let us know and we’ll include your link here expressly. (17 Aug 2014) http://monoskop.org/Bauhaus

Your film, 1994 Computer Lab, is in post-production. While reviewing the dailies, you’ve noticed a big problem. The CRT monitors in every shot have fat, dark lines scrolling vertically on their screens. No worries: You have a billion-dollar budget to work with, so you’ll simply rename the film 2014 Computer Lab and reshoot all those scenes with LCD monitors. But what’s this? There are no lines on the screens anymore, but the LCD monitors look like they’re flickering in your footage. Will you need to rename the movie 2034 Computer Lab and develop futuristic monitor technology to use in the film? And why don’t any Read more

iPhone/Android: Need a quick and dirty floor plan for your house? Free app MagicPlan can put one together using just your smartphone’s camera. This is where the MagicPlan app comes in. First, it uses your phone’s camera to measure the dimensions of each room, which means you can have your whole house measured in a matter of minutes, instead of spending a couple of hours wrangling a tape measure. The measurements are accurate enough for planning purposes (although I still recommend breaking out an actual tape measure when you’re going to build something.) You can also download a PDF of your Read more

check out www.wittner-cinetec.de from Germany: http://www.wittner-cinetec.de/… http://www.wittner-cinetec.de/… Andec from Berlin is still selling leftovers of Velvia 100D manufactured up until 2013: http://www.andecfilm.de/en/e_s… Frank Bruinsma from the Netherlands is still selling leftovers of Ektachrome 100D also made up until 2013: http://www.super8.nl/english/e… And then there’s mysterious KAHL FILM: http://www.kahlfilm.de/content…BEsides outdated Ferrania stock, he’s also selling his mysterious own stocks, but he’s only selling to film & TV professionals.

Online classes are a great way to learn new skills. SlideRule makes your search easier by letting you browse and search through over 17,000 online courses. SlideRule’s reach is extensive and covers many popular education providers, like Codecademy, Khan Academy, Udemy, and MIT Open Courseware. You can browse by provider or through subjects like Computers & Technology, Business & Economics, and Law. SlideRule also has a review system so users can rate courses and help you avoid the ones that aren’t worth your time. The service is fairly new so there isn’t an overabundance of reviews yet, but as more Read more

This post will focus specifically on photographs to allow for additional detail in the suggestions for their particular care. http://theironroom.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/preserving-your-family-papers-a-practical-approach-to-the-preservation-of-photographs/

We are delighted to announce that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images. Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge. The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you Read more

Get your Clipping Paths made for for $0.49 each We do it 100% hand-made. Clipping Factory isolates images from their backgrounds. You can upload images without a path; and within 12-24 hours (rush service in 12 hours, standard service in 24 hours), you can download these same images, but now with a path. Take a look at the “How to Send Files” section for a detailed description of the work flow. It describes how to send us your images, in what format, and what to do with them once we’ve returned them to you. http://www.clippingfactory.com/introduction.php

Guide to Projectors for Interactive Installations http://www.creativeapplications.net/tutorials/guide-to-projectors-for-interactive-installations/ Video projectors are one of the most important tools for creators of interactive installations. The information for projectors is available on various websites, but this 2 part guide will focus on their use in production and interactive environments. Part 1 will focus on the projector as hardware(lenses, lumens, surfaces etc), and part 2 will go into more details on the software and calibration considerations. This will gather some of that disparate knowledge into the important bits you need to make informed decisions about creating a high quality experience. They vary in scale Read more

The process is quite simple: use your inkjet printer to print the image on a non-porous surface, like the leftover glossy part of a used sheet of labels. From there, you can transfer the image to the wood.P Note that the wood needs to be bare to absorb the ink. After it dries, you can gloss over it to preserve the image and make the colors pop a little more. Check out the video to see it in action.P How to transfer an inkjet photo to wood | Steve Ramsey via Hack a DayP

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has launched its latest copyright notice which helps explain specific areas of copyright in the UK. The notice is aimed at small businesses and individuals who use digital or photographic images on the web. It also provides advice for people who may find their own images being used online and includes many of the recent changes to the law. The Copyright Notice can be downloaded by clicking here.

Long article with extensive tests comparing optical film resolution of different camera types and film sizes: http://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2011/12/big-camera-comparison/ Article as PDF here: Big Camera Comparison – On Landscape

THE 50 STATES PROJECT 50 photographers from across the USA. Each photographer lives in one of the 50 States and represents the State where they currently live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. http://www.50statesproject.net/ AFTERIMAGE GALLERY http://www.afterimagegallery.com/ A GALLERY FOR FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY New Orleans, LA, gallery of photographs http://www.agallery.com/Pages/departments/photographers.html THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY Online museum of photography specializing in online exhibitions of daguerreotypes and early photographic works. http://www.photographymuseum.com/ AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY: A CENTURY OF IMAGES Companion site to the PBS video series. Read more

The Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice book and website are about photography in the widest possible sense of the word. Each presents a broad and inclusive rethinking of conceptual and technical aspects of photography across time periods, across themes, and through varied materials. Essays and how-to sections provide ideas, information, and inspiration for artists who use photography in varied ways. The book brings photographic education up to date with contemporary art practice. Essays link photographic conventions with a history of ideas, involving such topics as architecture, literature, psychology, and genetics, and introduce related artists and artworks. How-to sections describe an extensive range Read more

Public lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms. The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) is a community — supported by a 501(c)3 non-profit — which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible Do-It-Yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment. The core Public Lab program is focused on “civic science” in which Read more

Valuing and evaluating academic digital humanities practice are topics of discussion at many colleges and universities, including UNC. Here are some contributions to this ongoing and rapidly expanding discussion: promotion and tenure guidelines from professional organizations and other universities, essays, blog posts, and podcasts. http://digitalhumanities.unc.edu/resources/valuing-evaluating-dh-practice Art History and its Publications in the Electronic Age A report by Hilary Ballon and Mariët Westermann. Beyond Productivity: Information, Technology, Innovation, and Creativity A report from the National Research Council (2003) on intersection of information technology, art, and design. Ths sixth section, “Schools, College, and Universities” includes a discussion of particular interest Read more

Defining documentary has never been easy, all the more because of different cultural traditions. The English-speaking world often looks back to the British documentarian John Grierson’s definition of the form as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ — a useful phrase that he first used to describe Robert Flaherty’s Moana, but one that inadvertently wedded the documentary project to the linear narrative. Other cultures have used other descriptors, embracing radically different types of filmmaking in their understanding of the documentary. Today’s interactive documentaries compel us to revisit our assumptions. We take an expansive view of documentary, and are above all interested Read more

http://nimk.nl/eng/syncstarter Introduction In the video art field there are many artworks requiring the real-time synced playback of audio/video. We develop free and open source digital video syncstarter software to distribute and exhibit multi-channel video artworks requiring synced playback of multiple videos on multiple screens. The tradition of syncstarter development was initiated by René Coelho in Amsterdam (Montevideo, 1980); Since 2005 digital syncstarter solutions are developed in the Artlab to continue the artisanal tradition of syncing videos using computers. We emphasize the freedom to share and re-use the digital code we produce: all our software is licensed as free and open source (GNU General Read more

Matrox DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go external multi-display adapters let you add two or three monitors to your laptop or desktop computer. They connect to the video output of your system and use its existing GPU to provide high quality, uncompressed graphics and video across all monitors. These little black or silver boxes are perfect for bringing multi-monitor functionality to computers with only one monitor, such as systems with integrated graphics or no available expansion slots—or closed systems that have already been validated. Connect two or three monitors to your system to see more, do more Support VGA, DVI or DisplayPort™ monitors Read more

http://www.zachpoff.com/software/video-trigger/ Attach a camera and trigger sounds (and more) whenever occupancy is detected in six user-defined areas of the video image. You have complete control over the playback logic and signal routing. Surround is supported. (If you want to trigger a video instead of sounds, see my other app,Video Triggers Video.) I designed Video Trigger for artists who want to experiment with interactivity without building custom hardware or software. It aims to answer the question that I hear from many of my students: “How do I make a sound play when somebody walks by?” The answer often involves micro-controllers (likeArduino), or software (like Processing, pd, vvvv,Lily, Isadora, Read more

SingleFramer is a frame-capture application for animators. It captures individual frames from an attached video camera, either manually or automatically (time-lapse). You can turn on “onion-skinning” to see an overlay of your previous frame as you compose your shot. You can also “onion-skin” an existing movie so you can match your setup from one day to the next. (Useful for school situations where you might need to break down borrowed equipment between shoots.) Basic functions can be controlled via Applescript. (see the included scripts) SingleFramer supports NTSC and PAL cameras. (Sorry, no HD cameras and no digital still cameras.)If you’re looking Read more

http://www.zachpoff.com/software/chroma-key-live/ Free Real-time HD Green-Screen Software Chroma Key Live “keys out” selected areas of live video, allowing a background to show through. It features Syphon I/O, HD resolutions and full GPU acceleration. A few years ago, some of my students were doing a green-screen shoot and needed to visualize the chromakey while shooting, so their actors could see the composite while they performed. We didn’t need the advanced features of professional software like Veescope, Wirecast, BoinxTV, VirtualEyez, or Visual Communicator so I made my own solution. Chroma Key Live performs a basic realtime chromakey on your computer screen, in SD or HD resolutions, with adjustable tolerance Read more

http://www.zachpoff.com/software/network-audio-transmitter/ Transmit/receive uncompressed stereo audio over a local network. Turn two computers into a really expensive XLR cable… for free! A student recently asked how to make a high-quality audio link from the basement of a building to an upper floor. It’s too long to run a cable, and a suitable radio link would be complicated. The building does have an ethernet network, so I created these applications. (Just a set of user-interfaces around therecommended MAX/MSP methods for uncompressed network audio streaming.) It’s a complex solution to a simple problem, but computers/networks seem to be more plentiful than hundreds of Read more

http://www.zachpoff.com/software/multi-point-keystone-video-player/ A simple (free) “projection mapping” tool for distorting video during playback. Stretch your image to fit into corners, ceilings, or other complex shapes. The simple “keystone” adjustment on video projectors can fix vertical alignment problems, but sometimes I project video in odd places that require horizontal keystoning, diagonal keystoning, or even multi-point distortion (especially for corner projection). Multi-Point Keystone Video Player is a tool I made for these special situations. It combines a movie player and an “extreme keystoning” engine. QuickTime movies play in a continuous loop and you “pin” each corner to an arbitrary location via the mouse. Read more

http://www.zachpoff.com/software/multiscreener/ MultiScreener is a set of free applications that synchronize the playback of Quicktime movies on multiple computers, using a local network to tie them all together. (It can also sync multiple movies on the same computer using multiple monitors.) It is intended for multi-channel video art, video walls, trade shows, and digital signage. I wanted an artist-friendly alternative to the expensive combo of industrial DVD players (Pioneer DVD-V7400, DVD-V5000) and Dave Jones Design sync boxes. Those systems are fantastic, but MultiScreener provides synchronized multi-channel video playback using commodity computer hardware. How It Works There is a Server and a Client. The server plays a Read more

http://www.zachpoff.com/software/brightsign-video-sync-scripts/ Background My MultiScreener software plays Quicktime movies on Mac computers, using ethernet to keep any number of computers playing in sync. It works great (and has been used around the world by artists, galleries and museums) but computers are expensive, complicated, and inherently unreliable. Inexpensive media players (like the WD TV series) are often used for looping presentations because they play most HD formats and have no fans or discs to wear out. But they can’t do multi-screen synchronization (except via HDSync replacement firmware). BrightSign makes industrial media players that support network features and complex interactivity. For multichannel video presentations, the $350 HD220 player is perfect. Read more

This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive’s software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software) https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware

SYNCHRONATOR ColorControl http://synchronator.com/colorcontrol.html The SYNCHRONATOR ColorControl is a device for mixing two channels of audio into an RGB Triphonic signal. Its output is to be connected to a SYNCHRONATOR < audio to video > device in order to create a composite video signal. The ColorControl has two controllers for hue and two sliders for setting the saturation for each input channel. Depending on the hue and saturation settings, the signal is proportionally divided over the RGB Triphonic outputs. Unlike regular audio equipment, which works fine for sound within the hearable range, the ColorControl can handle frequencies up to 4 MHz Read more

Open source applications make it easy to create, listen to and view digital audio and video content. Animation 1. Blender Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Suitable for professional use, Blender is a 3D animation suite that offers modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and game creation capabilities. It also features a customizable interface, and it can import and export from a wide variety of file formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X. 2. Art of Illusion Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Art of Illusion isn’t quite as polished as Blender, but its developers claim the latest version (released September 2013) “is both stable Read more